


It's Going to Be a Bumpy Night

by Muir_Wolf



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 21:37:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muir_Wolf/pseuds/Muir_Wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penny!fic. That pretty much covers it. There’s some Penny/Sheldon, because I can’t help it, and there’s Penny/Acting, but this is pretty much Penny!fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Going to Be a Bumpy Night

**Author's Note:**

> Help_Haiti fic for juniperlane
> 
> Random quotes (including title) are from _All About Eve_ and _Dirty Dancing._

  


When she was sixteen years old, Penny let James Vick kiss her. She _let_ him kiss her.

Pay attention. This is important.

  


  


Penny loves her family.

She ran as far away from them as she could.

She can’t stand the way her mother sighs or the fact that her father has never been nice to any boy she’s ever brought home.

She misses her cousins. She went over her phone bill when she couldn’t afford it because her aunt Rose and her uncle Dave were getting divorced, and her aunt wouldn’t stop crying, and she’d needed her.

She doesn’t call her father.

(she hates herself for not calling her father)

She wants more than anything for them all to be proud of her.

  


  


In second grade, Penny was the fairy godmother. Golden ringlets of hair and a dress of silver and pink clouds and every other girl envied her. Even the Princess paled in comparison.

The Princess, Lily Fisk, pushed her in the middle of the stage, and Penny fell down in front of everyone.

Her dress tore.

Her hair fell loose from the pins her mother had spent hours placing.

For half a second she let her eyes fill with tears, let her bottom lip wobble. And then Penny punched Lily Fisk in the face.

(her father and the principal were hunting buddies and she got sent home for the day and had to apologize)

(her father hadn’t stopped talking about it for weeks)

  


  


Three years after leaving Omaha, Penny flips through television channels at two a.m. and comes across an old movie with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.

Her heart catches in her throat.

She stays up until three thirty watching them spark and smolder on screen, and when it’s over she curls up on the couch and cries herself to sleep.

  


  


Penny spent a summer when she was ten on crutches because her twelve year old neighbor dared her to jump off the roof and Penny wasn’t letting any boy think she was afraid of something like that.

His father spanked him while she was in the hospital getting her ankle set, but it didn’t matter.

They spent that summer making forts and avoiding their parents and finding out the hard way how important the knots are to rope bridges.

(there’s a reason Penny was so good when it came to hogtying)

  


  


When she was sixteen years old, Penny let James Vick kiss her.

(i told you this was important)

  


  


Penny ran as fast as she could when she twelve years old, her pillowcase stuffed with her life savings ($23.47) and half a loaf of bread.

She didn’t know where she was going, she just knew she couldn’t stay.

She wasn’t running _to_ , she was running _from._

  


  


Penny slaps Leonard.

(in her defense, he deserved it)

“Penny—” he says, and she slams the door behind her as she storms away.

Her chest burns with something like victory, her eyes burn with something else entirely.

“Penny!” he yells through the apartment door, so she retreats to her bedroom, slamming that door behind her, too.

She sits on her bed, and then swears.

Gets up.

Opens her bedroom door. Opens the apartment door.

Faces Leonard head on.

(she’s done running)

  


  


She wore out the VHS tapes for _Dirty Dancing_ and _All About Eve_ by the time she’d turned fourteen. _I’ll act_ , she thought. _I’ll dance,_ she thought.

 _Nobody puts Penny in the corner,_ she’d grinned as she’d walked to school.

 _Fasten your seatbelt_ , she told herself. _You’re in for one hell of a ride._

  


  


“Hey Dad,” she says when he answers the phone.

“Yeah,” she says. “I love you, too.”

  


  


When she was sixteen years old, Penny let James Vick kiss her.

He was the star of the Varsity football team. All the girls loved him.

And she was blonde Penny, gorgeous Penny, cheerleader Penny.

He took her out to dinner.

He kissed her up against his car.

Her father came out with the shotgun and she ran inside.

 _She told her dad she hated him._

(she lied)

  


  


It’s a part in an independent film.

She practices her lines until she knows them by heart, and then she hides her script and starts all over again.

She makes Sheldon practice lines with her.

(he falls back into his Texan accent when he reads the script)

She can feel the character, if she tries. She knows what she’s looking for now.

How a life is made up of heartbeats and moments.

She can feel the heartbeats, she can see the moments.

 _She’s running into the wind instead of with it._

  


  


When Penny was five, she kissed Tommy Lennox.

He’d fallen hard and fast for her.

They held hands during story time.

He called her “Pretty.”

She broke his heart and never looked back.

  


  


Sheldon offers the crook of his arm, the black jacket curving perfectly to his skin, his lips quirking up in a put-upon smirk.

Penny, in a gold dress that makes everyone else envious, slides her arm through his.

“I believe the appropriate thing to say is that you look beautiful,” Sheldon says after a moment, and she grins up at him.

“So say it,” she says.

“You look…breathtaking,” he says. “At least, given the way my breath caught in my throat when I saw you, I believe that is the more accurate term.”

Her heart beats faster, but she steadies her breath, tightens her hold on him.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” she says.

“I’m fairly certain it’s a non-optional social convention,” he replies, voice dry, and she lets out a startled laugh. Heads turns towards them, cameras flash.

“I think you might be right,” she says, and he slants an amused glance down at her.

“Penny,” he says. “I usually am.”

  


  


She looks up at him through mascara-darkened eyelashes as he drawls lines about the complexities of love, blue eyes more brilliant than anything she has ever seen.

Her hands are unsteady, because she can feel the story of the character—the hopes and dreams and sighs and sorrows of Anna Daern, as close to her heart as her own life.

 _Maybe she’d always run too far from herself to ever see it before._

“Penny?” he asks, voice catching a bit as he sees the way she’s looking at him.  


 _Intense. Longing._

“From Act II,” she says, voice firm. “I can do it better.”

  


  


“How’s my girl?” her father asks when she answers.

She almost drops the phone.

“I’m good, Dad,” she says. “I’m really good.”

  


  


The day after principal filming wraps, they go out to dinner. Sheldon toasts her with his virgin _cuba libre_. She flirts lightly. He makes her laugh.

 _How do you call your loverboy?_

Outside her apartment, blue eyes dark, he kisses her.

She kisses him back.

 

  
_Finis_   



End file.
